Do the underlying databases used by OpenLDAP not support index ordered
retrieval?
All this functional delimiting and performance stuff is unimportant if the
database itself keeps the data indexed properly. I mean, why would you want to
order the data when you need to read it? That simply doesn't scale well on
either the client or the server... why not order it when you write it?
OK. Maybe I'm just an idiot... I haven't written a large database manager in
more than a decade, and never in C (I wrote the taxonomic database system for
the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and the Malacology collection
data management system for their extremely large shell collection, sometime in
the late 80s - early 90s). But this seems like a DBM issue to me and not a
retrieval protocol (ldaP) issue.
Thank you, Howard, for pointing out the (obvious in retrospect) filtering
trick. And thanks, Kurt & Ace, for pointing out the 3-character thing... I had
assumed that was somehow my own fault when I started getting user reports of
that behaviour years ago.
--Charlie
On 23 Apr 2004 at 2:44, Howard Chu wrote:
>
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org
> > [mailto:owner-openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org]On Behalf Of Jon Poulton
>
> > I'll give an example of why one isnt much use without the other.
> >
> > Say I'm displaying a directory of all my applications users
> > in a webapp and
> > Im using OpenLdap to store the users. I want to display my
> > users by the
> > letter that their surname begins with (A, B, C ... Z), in alphabetical
> > order, with one Page per letter (plus sub pages for letters
> > which have a
> > large number of associated users). Say I have 10,000 users.
>
> If that's the best example you can come up with, it's still not very
> compelling. Since your requirements are so simple and well defined, there's a
> very simple solution. If you want one user-interface page per letter, issue a
> search with an appropriate filter, e.g.
> (sn=A*)
> to populate your 'A' page, etc. etc...
>
> > What bothers me isnt that OpenLdap doesnt support sorting of
> > search results,
> > but that its not even on the roadmap for any future versions. Surely
> > server-side sorting of results is quite a high priority requirement?
>
> I believe LDAP is intended to be a large-scale distributed information
> storage/retrieval mechanism. I don't believe it is an individual client
> presentation system. One might as well complain that NFS doesn't sort
> remote-mounted filesystem directories before presenting them to your
> command-line shell. That's not the server's job, that is the user-interface's
> job.
>
> -- Howard Chu
> Chief Architect, Symas Corp. Director, Highland Sun
> http://www.symas.comhttp://highlandsun.com/hyc
> Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support